What does their current process look like?
Are they driven by any regulations?
What would be our differentiator?
What’s their biggest obstacles?
How are other products handling these issues?
Where's our market?
Often has other responsibilities
Regulations that differ depending on industry
Bigger companies have a dedicated role for continuity planning
There is a need to pass down work
The need to communicate to upper management
Yearly review cycle
More information gathering which causes delays and confusion
Customers that require regulations to be meet in their plans
Not understanding what all needs to be included in a plan
Approval process varied more by industry than expected
Customers having multiple products to be synced with
Where's our market?
My Learnings
These are the use cases that I discovered through my research and conversations with experts and customers.
Overwhelming & Regulated
As a user that is required by the Department of Financial Services to have a bc plan I need help with what's required.
Complex & Unorganized
As a user that keeps my plan in Word and Excel documents, my current process is hard to fully understand, implement, and update.
Funding & Approval
As a user I need a way to effectively communicate to obtain leadership approval and funding for disaster response planning.
Tailored Flows. Initial versions lacked tailored flows, but we quickly identified this gap and developed them to address specific use cases effectively.
Intro Section. This was also something we added after our initial feedback. Letting users understand what is ahead not only with the sidebar but with some brief descriptions.
Status by Section. Creating these status indicators allowed our users to understand their progress while also keeping seamless process with multiple sessions.
Pre-populate Data. Through the research phase we identified that providing our customers with pre-populate data was going to be a critical part to driving our differentiator as a product.
Experts & Current Customers. In order to set up this pre-populated data we needed to talk with experts and also look at the data from our current customer base.
Ability to Create New. While creating the pre-populated data was important we also needed to focus on the "creating new" experience as well. Giving suggestions along the way was well received in our tests.
Suggestions. I needed another way to help simplify the complexity of continuity planning. Pre-populated data could only go so deep, so adding onto that a slide out with further suggestions proved to be a huge selling point to some customers.
Further Explanations. Thinking about how most of our customers end up wearing multiple hats, being able to provide further explanations in a slide out and not overwhelm the page for those that do understand was a big draw.
Regulation Advice. A big learning curve for me was learning the different regulations within our different verticals. And then on top of that being able to provide guidance to those customers so they meet all the standards necessary.
Built a full-featured prototype to give users full immersion
5 Users, real data point SUS Score
Concept testing in different stages